Thomas Jefferson’s attack dog

“It was the happy privilege of an American that he may prattle and print in what way he pleases, and without anyone to make him afraid.”

— James T. Callender, shortly after arriving in Philadelphia in 1793

On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson walked up Capitol Hill dressed as “a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office,” to be sworn in as the third president of the United States of America. Unlike his predecessors, he carried no ceremonial sword.

In the Senate chamber, he delivered his address, according to a witness, in “so low a tone that few heard it.”

“Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things,” Jefferson pleaded. “And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.”

Maybe you know a little about the presidential campaign of 1800, a hardcore House of Cards-style struggle that had both sides invoking apocalyptic rhetoric. (It rates its own number in the musical Hamilton.) The Federalists had attacked Jefferson as an elitist Francophile and an un-Christian deist. A Connecticut newspaper aligned with Adams wrote that if Vice President Jefferson were elected, it would result in a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”

On the other hand, Jefferson’s DemocraticRepublicans objected to what they saw as President John Adams’ attack on individual rights through the the Alien and Sedition Acts, his expansion of the military, new taxes and his government’s deficit spending. To criminally over-simplify, the Federalists saw the need for a strong federal government and were suspicious of populist sentiment. (Or, as Hamilton may have said, “Your people, sir, is a great beast.”) The Democratic-Republicans thought the people were better served by a limited federal government, with relatively stronger state and local entities. (And so the philosophical basis of the two-party system was established.)

In the end Jefferson won what is still widely considered the dirtiest race in American political history over Adams and his fellow DemocraticRepublican Aaron Burr, who wound up second in the race and became vice president.

(While Burr was essentially Jefferson’s running mate, he nearly became president when Federalists in the House of Representatives realized Adams’ cause was lost and sought to thwart Jefferson by throwing their support to Burr. But then anti-Adams “High Federalist” Alexander Hamilton stepped in. Hamilton argued that Jefferson was the lesser of two evils because while his principles were wrong-headed he at least had some. This didn’t sit well with Burr, who’d shoot Hamilton to death on the Heights of Weehawken four years later.)

One of the reasons Jefferson might not have been projecting during his inaugural address is because later that very day, a man named James Thompson Callender was being released from jail. President Adams had Callender arrested and imprisoned for sedition during the campaign for, among other things, writing that Adams “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”

Jefferson would soon pardon Callender. For good reason. For years Jefferson had covertly enlisted Callender—an admirer of Jonathan Swift who’d fled his native Scotland in 1793 after publishing a controversial tract called The Political Progress of Britain, a critique of war, imperialism and corruption that led to his being indicted by the Crown—as a political weapon. It was Jefferson, the man calling for civility and tolerance, who had paid Callender to write nasty things about Adams.

Callender might deserve his own musical, for what we know of his life cries out for adaptation. (William Safire wrote a best-selling novel called Scandalmonger based on Callender’s life. ) He arrived in America a stalwart abolitionist, but when he found favor with the Democratic-Republicans he modified his views, bringing them in line with his patron Jefferson’s. He made his bones attacking Hamilton; in 1796 he uncovered the secretary of state’s affair with Maria Reynolds and the subsequent extortion scheme Hamilton fell prey to, essentially wrecking any chance Hamilton ever had of becoming president. (Jefferson himself may have leaked to information to Callender though most historians believe it was Jefferson’s ally John Beckley, who served as clerk of the House of Representatives until the Federalists pushed him out in 1796.)

Callender even had a little something for the hero of the Revolution, George Washington. “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by WASHINGTON,” wrote Callender. “If ever a nation has suffered from the improper influence of a man, the American nation has been deceived by WASHINGTON. Let his conduct then be an example to future ages. Let it serve to be a warning that no man may be an idol, and that a people may confide in themselves rather than in an individual.”

Not long after Jefferson pardoned Callender, the pamphleteer petitioned the president, asking to be appointed postmaster of Richmond, Va., which just happened to be a Federalist stronghold. When Jefferson ignored his pleas, Callender switched sides and went to work for a Federalist newspaper, where he immediately revealed that Jefferson had funded his attacks on Adams and broke the non-fake news story that Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sarah “Sally” Hemmings.

He drowned, some say under mysterious circumstances, in three feet of water in the James River near Richmond in 1803. The newspapers— at least the Democratic-Republican newspapers—reported he was too drunk to save himself.

Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.